Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and ...

focused on the early nineteenth century, when the Caribbean trade was burgeoning after the ban on the African slave trade and before abolitionists began striving to curb it too.⁵ However, the forced movement of captives among colonial venues via the shadowy channels of the itinerant slave trade was also a harsh reality of slave life in the previous century. Indeed, to understand the complexity of the eighteenth-century slave trade and its human costs, one must factor in these sorts of forced moves and consider their cumulative effects as trading paths also became slaving path

The Chattel Principle in Action

Under the cruel logic of the chattel principle, which reduced human beings to property that could be bought and sold at will, a slave owner could at any time change an enslaved person’s destiny in order to settle a debt or liquidate capital, to reallocate labor for convenience or profit, to execute plantation justice through banishment, or to satisfy a whim.⁶ Slaves were thus shifted, sometimes repeatedly, through sprawling networks of trade; the resulting geographical displacement might have involved solitary individuals, pairs, or small groups of three or four. When merchants and ship captains included such people on their shipping manifests, they precipitated the dislocation of individuals without regard to the slaves’ well-being or to the destruction of family ties and social relations that such upheavals inevitably entailed. By its very nature, such practices of redistributing labor resources eroded slave communities as their constituents were uprooted and scattered, like so many grains of sand, throughout the Atlantic region. As Walter Johnson has pointed out, even though the numbers of people involved may not have been vast, the devastating “effects on traded slaves (and the families and communities they left behind) were not reduced by the fact that the trade that destroyed their lives was, in aggregate terms, a good deal smaller than that practiced elsewhere.”⁷ Indeed, some historians have characterized such forced moves among and within colonial venues as tantamount to an extension of the Middle Passage.⁸